Category Archives: Development

We’re often talking to interesting people attempting to do interesting things. Last week I was in Manchester at AGMA’s invitation to meet the heads of planning. They are busy thinking through what devolution means and how to prepare for a Mayor (great song title that).
They helped me to see that our framework can play a useful role in bringing a city region together.

Working backwards from their offer to investors and applicants they need to do two things

Make a city-wide view of development opportunities (a combined SHLAA in the jargon) [more on this later and separately]

Guarantee a good customer service from every planning department

It’s this second one that they can get more-or-less for free from our planning quality framework. By the way you can see the latest version of a report (using real data but not identifiable data) here (dummy report). Those who can read these things will see that the variation across these particular councils is too wide for a city region to pretend it is pulling together. (Council 13 is indeed unlucky for some)

The PQF operates at a very fine level of detail to help people understand how they are performing and (where necessary) work out which particular areas are worth digging into.

All we need to add is a public cut of the data which can act as a transparent performance snapshot. And, which is exciting for me, when they get going on the survey part of the framework this performance guarantee will *not* be based on some silly 8-week target or indeed solely speed-based measures. It will be based on how people think they have been treated.

We use percentages all the time in planning. It’s in the DNA – percentage compliance with a national indicator is what makes many planners get up in the morning. But they are useless at understanding what is going on.

Take this output from a report I was looking at today, pretending I was from Salford. It’s section 2a – a breakdown of approval rates by category of development.

As you’d expect, most of the approval rates are 90%+, so perhaps you should investigate what’s happening with prior approvals and certificates of lawfulness ? But hold on. Continue reading →